Yesterday I was chatting with Belghast about the general mystery surrounding the gaming habits of the larger MMO blogging population. I had expected World of Warcraft talk to shoot through the roof following BlizzCon, but I’ve only seen a very mild bump.

So what is everyone playing? Thanks to my baby, I’ve been accumulating an unread backlog of to-read blog posts, so I decided that I’d burn through 180 of them in a go and track what games the authors said they were playing (and, of course, blogging about). Here are the results of a very informal survey of this reading marathon:

World of Warcraft (17)

Fallout 4 (13)

Final Fantasy XIV (10)

Guild Wars 2 (6)

SWTOR (6)

RIFT (3)

EverQuest 2 (3)

WildStar (3)

The Secret World (2)

Hearthstone (2)

Wizard101 (1)

Life is Strange (1)

The Park (1)

DDO (1)

Diablo 3 (1)

Devilian (1)

Final Fantasy XIII (1)

EVE Online (1)

Elder Scrolls Online (1)

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (1)

Pokemon (1)

Star Wars Battlefront (1)

Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void (1)

Neverwinter (1)

Fallout New Vegas (1)

ArcheAge (1)

Wurm Online (1)

LOTRO (1)

Dota 2 (1)

Black Ops 3 (1)

World of Warships (1)

Nice smattering of a wide range of games with no big surprises in the top five. It did make me think how, just a few years ago, LOTRO was a huge blogging topic, and before that games like WAR and so on. I just wanted to get a finger on the pulse of what was happening right now (admittedly with a very narrow window).

For kicks, I tossed out the same question to all of my Twitter followers: What are you playing? And boy did I get deluged with responses (because my followers are shining stars among humanity). Here’s that list, tallied up, with many people nominating more than one title:

Guild Wars 2 (25)

Fallout 4 (24)

WildStar (20)

SWTOR (19)

World of Warcraft (14)

Final Fantasy XIV (12)

Hearthstone (11)

Destiny (9)

Heroes of the Storm (8)

Marvel Heroes (8)

Star Trek Online (7)

The Secret World (7)

Star Wars Battlefront (6)

Starcraft 2 (5)

LOTRO (5)

Diablo 3 (4)

Overwatch (4)

Elder Scrolls Online (4)

League of Legends (3)

The Witcher 3 (3)

EVE Online (3)

A very interesting list indeed. I’m personally gratified to see WildStar doing pretty well up there, and surprised to see Star Trek Online up there (although maybe the recent patch plus TV series announcement helped?).

And for the rest of them, here are the two- and one-vote games sent my way!

Interesting divergence between the two metrics on Wildstar. As a social scientist I have to obsess about the selection bias here, though. (Seriously, I have to — it’s mandatory.) Since you are at this point one of the most vocal fans of WildStar in the blogging community, it makes sense that your reading list and particularly your audience will be disproportionately made up of WildStar fans.

Looking at a couple of more universal metrics, there’s evidence for an inference that WildStar now has about as many players as it did in (say) early September. That’s what Google Trends interest levels suggest, along with the WildStar subreddit metrics. The community by and large felt that the game’s population was huge in September, and it feels subjectively just as large now.

The alternative interpretation would be that the population has grown since conversion, but that the average intensity of engagement among old and new players has fallen — which I guess could make sense when the subscription cost is removed.

“Since you are at this point one of the most vocal fans of WildStar in the blogging community, it makes sense that your reading list and particularly your audience will be disproportionately made up of WildStar fans.”

There’s no proof for that. You may be right – but I for instance am not here because of Wildstar and I don’t follow Sypster because of Wildstar.

A month or two ago, I was juggling my second play through of Dragon Age: Inquisiton, World of Warcraft, and Elder Scrolls Online. Then I got sidetracked by Life Is Strange, The Park, and TSW’s Halloween event, and after that, I dived into Legacy of the Void.

Now my WoW sub has ran out, and I’m wrapping up my alt run of DA:I, but I still have a pretty huge backlog of single player titles on my Steam account, I’d like to get back to ESO soon, and I’d also like to start playing TSW more regularly at some point. I’m also tempted to give SW:TOR another try now that the expansion has changed so much, and I’m thinking of giving Blade and Soul a whirl once it comes out in January. And at some point I’ll need to get back to WoW, because moose mount.

Oh, and on top of all that, I’m still playing Heroes of the Storm regularly.

After your blog the other day I have this mental picture of you typing out that final, “one pointer” list with the index finger of one hand while holding your newborn in the other. It must have taken hours to write this post. 😉

I’m mostly playing WoW and SW:TOR at the moment, with the odd duo-session of Wildstar when the opportunity presents itself. But there’s so much more I wish I could be playing if I had more time. I try and play EQ2 and I’m tempted by Destiny but really can’t take on another game at the moment.

I’m a little surprised that there was no mention of Trove in all of that tbh.

Myself, I’m mostly playing Trove, Heroes of the Storm and Fallout 4 right now.

AthieNovember 20, 2015 / 10:25 am

@krieglich, let’s talk about this for a moment. You say there is “no proof” of selection bias here. I suppose it depends on what counts as proof. You offer yourself as an example of a reader who doesn’t play or follow Wildstar. Great! But as a piece of evidence not much use. I don’t think that literally all of Syp’s readers are WildStar fans. Instead it seems that WildStar fans are over represented.

So what is the evidence? First, Syp writes about WildStar — in fact he writes more about the game than any other blogger that I know of. That’s empirical. Second, enough of Syp’s readership is playing WildStar to put the game in the top 3-8 on Syp’s lists. Whereas available public metrics like Google Trends and Reddit data show interest in WildStar to be below interest in games like Rift, Star Trek Online, and Trove. This is substantial evidence of selection bias — the alternative explanations being that Syp’s readers lied in the poll or that the public data are hugely incorrect.

Just finished Knights of the Old Republic 2, enjoying Dust: An Elysian Tail, been working my way through Wing Commander 1’s expansion… but I’ve always known I was a little different in my tastes, and I’m proud that I don’t follow the crowd, even if it’s not as popular. 😛